Primed to accept brutality as normal in romantic relationships

It’s not enough that classic works of literature like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights are to be given a 50 Shades of Grey makeover (read how Catherine Earnshaw enjoys bondage sessions with Heathcliff!). Or that there are 50 Shades of Grey mother and daughter cooking classes (whip up ’Playroom Pretzel Ropes’ and ‘Bondage Wrapped Shrimp’ with mum!) Or ‘My mummy pretends Christian Grey is my daddy’ slogans on baby jumpsuits complete with charming handcuff motifs.

The ‘50 Shades’ juggernaut rolls on, consuming everything in its wake. Now the latest market is teens who are being targeted with spin-offs from the phenomenon.

We know 13 and 14-year-olds are already reading this ode to sadism, receiving an early lesson in submission 101.

In the multi-million dollar best seller, Anastasia Steele has to sign a contract agreeing to do whatever her lover Christian Grey wants. She must be available on call.

One of the terms is: ‘The submissive shall submit to any sexual activity without hesitation or argument’. This is presented as true love rather than as a powerful man controlling a naïve young woman having her first sexual experience.

Anastasia feels “demeaned, debased, and abused.” But Grey is wealthy and showers her with gifts. Isn’t that so romantic? Cruelty is OK, as long as there is a happy ending.

Now teens are being sold their own versions, promoted as’ erotic fiction’ helping them ‘explore their sexuality’. But what is it that is being eroticised?

One of the most new popular titles for young people is Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire. Here’s an extract about the reaction of main character Travis after Abby sleeps with him and leaves without saying goodbye:

“Travis is a fucking wreck! He won’t talk to us, he’s trashed the apartment, threw the stereo across the room… He took a swing at Shep [roommate] when he found out we helped you leave. Abby! It’s scaring me! … he’s gone fucking nuts! I heard him call your name, and then he stomped all over the apartment looking for you. …he tried to call you. Over, and over and over…His face was… I’ve never seen him like that. He ripped his sheets off the bed, and threw them away, threw his pillows away, shattered his mirror with his fist, kicked his door… broke it from the hinges! It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”

Ah, young love. Travis, unhinged, goes around destroying things when he can’t get his way. He tries to blackmail Abby and limit her freedom. Obsession and jealousy are misread as love.

One young reader wrote on the Goodreadings site “I felt like Abby was in danger throughout the entire novel…anyone as needy as Travis is dangerous, in my opinion, especially when alcohol is in the mix”. Smart girl.

We are seeing a trend toward the acceptance of brutality as normal in romantic relationships. I heard a 15-year-old boy say he slaps girls and pulls their hair during sex because he read they liked it. Some girls expect to receive bruises from sex. Why say it with flowers when you can show it with beatings?

The view that ‘erotic’ fiction is an alternative to kids visiting porn sites has not been demonstrated. Even if they read one or two books, the bombardment of sexual imagery and porn online will barely be dented. Average age of first exposure to online porn is 11.

Age social affairs writer Michelle Griffin has argued that kids should be reading porn-themed books, recommending ‘House of Holes’ for the school library and family bookshelf. This is the book described by The Guardian as a “porn fest.”

There is a difference between literature which help teenage girls interpret their natural curiosity in sex and their bodies and literature which seeks to shape or exploit it.

Melbourne mother Helen Parkes wrote to me: “There are 12 & 13 year olds in my daughter’s class reading 50 shades and other ‘steamys’… I don’t think these are positive in any way even as a tool to ‘begin dialogue’. I want my daughter and her friends to spend a few years participating in school plays and sports instead of grooming themselves for men before they even know who they are and what they enjoy”.

Girls and young women describe cold, soul-less sexual experiences in which they are expected to be service stations for boys, pressured to ‘put out’, with no concern for their emotional wellbeing.

Will these so-called erotic novels help develop respect-based relationships? Real connection and intimacy? I doubt it. Yet that’s what girls say they want. In this months’ Girlfriend, the magazine’s sex survey shows 76% of readers are not sexually active – 56% say it’s because they are waiting for real love.

Reading material that portrays sex as a part of caring, complex, human relationships is a way of promoting healthy physical and psychological development. We should be equipping and empowering young people to make positive choices about their sexual lives rather than training them in domination and submission.

Perhaps it’s time for some explicit content on love and authentic human connection?

There is a difference between role playing and abuse. My husband and I like to take turns on being the submissive in our love making. We love it. It spices up our sex life and we look forward to it. There is no abuse, just role playing.

“Sadomasochism is an institutionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships. And, it prepares us either to accept subordination or to enforce dominance. Even in play, to affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, is empowering, is to set the emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship, politically, socially, and economically. Sadomasochism feeds the belief that domination is inevitable and legitimately enjoyable.

The s/m concept of “vanilla” sex is sex devoid of passion. They are saying that there can be no passion without unequal power. That feels very sad and lonely to me, and destructive. The linkage of passion to dominance/subordination is the prototype of the heterosexual image of male-female relationships, one which justifies pornography. Women are supposed to love being brutalized. This is also the prototypical justification of all relationships of oppression—that the subordinate one who is “different” enjoys the inferior position.”

Fifty Shades is not about role-playing. It’s about a woman happily becoming a man’s slave. I’m glad you and your husband are having fun, but that really says nothing about these books or the larger societal patterns they stem from and support. Fifty Shades is poisonous. The idea of young girls reading it makes me weep for humanity.

It’s naive to think that the roles we play in the bedroom absolutely never bleed over into the outside world. It’s naive to think that no one who was being abused ever failed to recognize it as abuse.

And it’s beyond naive and straying into denial territory to believe the outside world never bleeds over into the bedroom either. If that were so, then despite our patriarchal system that expects men to dominate and women to submit, there would be equal numbers of male and female “dominants” and “submissives,” but there aren’t. There are many more female “subs” and many more male “doms.”

As if the current state of porn and every other part of society weren’t already doing it, girls now have bestselling, crappily written novels to teach them that they can only please men by allowing men to hurt and degrade them. This is about much more than one couple’s happy bedroom games.

The issue is not about individual women – rather it is about how the porn industry’s endless misogynistic propaganda is ensuring innumerable girls and young women are uncritically accepting the misogynistic lie they only exist to be males’ disposable sexual service stations. Remember males cannot harm or inflict sexual violence on females because they, unlike males are supposedly dehumanised sexual service stations!

Or to put another way, the issue is not about an individual woman’s decision to engage in supposedly ‘consensual BDSM’ but how women and girls collectively are being told by porn industry they are nothing more than males’ disposable sexual service stations. There is a real socio-economic power difference between males and females, because whilst one woman might be fortunate to have a male sexual partner who does not commit sexual violence against her, this in no way removes the fact males collectively are accorded the pseudo right to sexually dominate/subject female sexual partners to male sexual violence.

No constructive criticism of the porn industry’s misogynistic promotion that male sexual violence against female partners is ‘erotic/empowering to women/girls’ must be allowed. Instead girls and young women are learning they have no sexual rights whatsoever and their sole role is to constantly sexually service males.

The young reader was spot-on when she recognised the fictional male character ‘Travis’ is dangerous to women and teen girls.’ But ‘Travis’ is how males are supposed to behave because it is all about males being accorded their pseudo right of sexual gratification by sexually exploiting/sexually degrading those supposedly ‘dehumanised beings who happen to be female.’

It’s wonderful to know that Melinda is able to present a case for protecting children/young adults from this trash-disguised-as-literature. It is clear to me that the the over-sexualization of today’s culture is threatening a massive scale emotional scarring for our youth. A new wave of mental health issues are already emerging that we are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with.

Thankyou for writing this article Melinda.
Teenagers (and adults) are already under so much pressure to conform to the normalised oversexualised way of being…we don’t need any more encouragement of this which feeds the so out of balance male energy in the world. The media and music videos are free porn already for the masses.

What humanity needs are more true role models of women honouring their worth and gracing the world with their nurturing tender ways. And role models for boys of men that are caring & tender. In essence role models of people expressing their natural selves…which is love.

And yes I totally agree that we should be educating our children to make empowering choices – that ultimately serve everyone. Those choices start with ourselves, for are we not the most influential role model for our kids!

Great Article Melinda – thank you for sharing your astute observations. Some great comments here too.

I feel we can go even a tad deeper and ponder why is it that any couple needs their sex life ‘spiced up’? Is that telling us that there is already an essential ingredient (True LOVE) missing or that the couple (one or both) is not prepared to engage in bringing Love into the relationship. By love I don’t mean any of the emotional stuff, dramas etc and Travis type expressions that is often (if not most of the time) presented to us under the disguise of ‘true love’.

We have made the act of sex into something very animalistic – which is NOT what it’s meant to be. If all these girls (and so many women including the main character in 50 shades of grey) are ‘waiting for the right one’ and looking for true love- is it possible that they are also speaking and are greatly aware of the difference between making love and having sex?

If we were to make love we wouldn’t need any ‘spices’ in the bedroom, but for sex, yes excitement might be / does appear to be needed. So how do we get to making love as opposed to making sex? Is it possible that this can start by developing truly loving, tender and caring relationship with ourselves and the love for us first. That way we’d create a marker, a point of truth of what is honouring of us and that which is not. Could it be that we would then not entertain any ‘subs’ or ‘doms’ roles whatsoever but instead the society of men and women where true equality, care, tenderness and love prevails?

I cannot help but feel that we women have a great role to play here and that by bringing back the focus to us, making clear choices not to allow any abuse whatsoever, the men will start to change too. After all, it is through our own change (be that a woman or a man) that any other can occur.

Melinda, Thank you so much for your simple humane sanity. More and more women who I thought had a clear anti-abuse stance are happily singing the praises of Fifty Shades. One of my girlfriends said, “Well everyone is reading it, I figured it must be good.”
Submissive in the bedroom, submissive in the media room, submissive to the dominant paradigm. The bleed over is inevitable. How has domination served our planet, humanity?
We are not ‘just animals.’ Brilliant scientist and socio-spiritual researcher Joseph Chilton Pearce, in an interview last year said, “Altruism, love and compassion for those we don’t even know, that’s what separates us a human species from other animal forms.”
These are the qualities that we as a people are currently deficient in and in need of developing.
“Around the age of eleven or twelve the brain undergoes a fine tuning and begins to decide what it can get rid of. The brain begins to shed the excess neural connections in either the ancient survival brain or in the new intellectual brain. What is removed depends upon children’s life situations at that time. The question of whether they feel safe and loved, or whether they feel like they must protect themselves against a hostile world has a profound effect on the intelligence of the child.”
As adults what we do and accept as unchangeable speaks loudly to our youth. This is not a dress rehearsal for a life well lived, a heroic game of survival in a hostile environment. Let’s not wait a minute longer, stand up and speak your truth, whoever you are, wherever you are.
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed for.- Chinese proverb.

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